"The massacre in 1989 at Tiananmen
Square in Beijing was a watershed event for me. As someone belonging to
a generation that went through the Cultural Revolution, I understood the
consequences of any political precedents in real life terms. The
bloodshed made me believe that there is a role in society for art, and
art should be used to prevent those kinds of events from happening in
the future. In order to achieve that we have to change ourselves first;
and we shall not allow any government to dehumanize its people,
otherwise the unthinkable history will repeat itself. The project "Five
Capital Executions in China," which I have been working on since 1992,
is that kind of undertaking."

"Chinese
citizens had no freedom to choose where to live and to work, same as the
college graduates. We were assigned the jobs by the government depending
on our family backgrounds and political behavior. I should graduate from
the Central Academy of Fine Arts in 1967, but the Cultural Revolution
started in 1966, the country was in chaos. The whole education systems
were stopped. A few years later, my college moved to the countryside, a
hard labor camp, guarded by military soldiers. From professors to
students all worked on the field for 3 years. In 1973, the military
assigned job for us, 6 years later than my graduation day. They assigned
me to Inner Mongolia, because I was a counterrevolutionary. This was a
punishment, a political exile. In long Chinese history, assignment of
people to outside of the Great Wall was always an exile. I had to leave
my husband and one year old son to go to Mongolia by myself."

"I loved the
outdoor work, the maps and all the gorgeous landscape photographs in the
geology text book. By the time I realized I wasn't so keen on the
science part of it I had completed all the course requirements for the
degree, except the thesis, so I opted to stick with it, and get my
degree. That same summer I took a figure painting work shop and realized
I wanted to pursue a career in art."

"We are habituated
to seek out easel paintings on whitewashed walls by known and named
artists, primarily Europeans. How often do we visit the corners or
basements, where “decorative arts” or exotic, often non-literate visual
cultures get marginalized?"

Reinventing a New Classic: The New Janson
by Charles Morscheck - Click Here